5 Marketing-Focused CTAs to Include in Your Transactional Emails

Transactional email can serve as a great marketing tool. With their higher deliverability rates, you don’t want to miss out on an opportunity to effectively and legally (yep, we’re talking about the CAN-SPAM Act) capitalize on these communications, while still staying true to the main purpose of your email. We’ve shared a few examples (Lands’ End, Zulily, UnCommon Goods) of how you can include marketing messaging in your transactional emails, but what about some CTA suggestions?

1. Surveys:

Gain customer feedback by asking them to complete a quick Net Promoter Score survey or answer a single question. A click-to-answer approach would work well— “click here for yes” or “here for no.”

2. Referrals:

Once you’ve identified your happy customers, transactional emails give you a great chance to ask them to refer your company to their friends and in return, earn a reward. We’ve seen great success with this approach at SendGrid.

3. Honest Opt-ins:

Allow your recipients to subscribe to your marketing emails with a link/button within a transactional email. If they appreciate the value in your transactional messages, they may be more willing to check out your other stuff, especially at that very moment. Also, you might proactively offer a link to their email settings, so recipients remain reminded of the fact that they control the emails they receive from you. These might seem close to requirements made by the CAN-SPAM Act, but there’s no harm in taking these safeguards even when they’re not mandated.

4. Followers and Likes:

Include a few unobtrusive (and nowadays, almost obligatory) icons to facilitate extra follows and likes on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

5. Proactive Support:

Include a link to documentation, forums, or support pages to offer help when the user most needs it. This is a nice gesture and, when implemented with some strategy, can be perfectly timed to fit naturally within your transactional email. For example, provide a link to contact your billing department with one click on a monthly invoice email.

Author: Jillian Wohlfarth

As SendGrid's Senior Manager of Content, Jillian is responsible for ensuring that SendGrid provides valuable thought leadership content through the blog, whitepapers, webcasts, case studies, and more. An editor and writer by trade, Jillian considers The Chicago Manual of Style one of her favorite reads.